


I Rise

by naberiie



Series: Duty, Loyalty, Sisterhood: Royal Handmaidens of Naboo ⚜ [6]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Acknowledgement of Impending Death, Destruction of Alderaan, Final moments, Fulcrum Agent Sabé, Gen, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Reflection, acceptance of death, various major/minor characters mentioned
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-10
Updated: 2017-10-10
Packaged: 2019-01-15 18:06:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,359
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12326121
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/naberiie/pseuds/naberiie
Summary: Last of the handmaidens, Sabé watches the Death Star approach Alderaan. She contemplates her life, her loves, her sorrows and joys, and her fate.She is not afraid. It will be like going home.





	I Rise

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by the new anthology 'From A Certain Point of View.'

Sabé Nyima knew death when she saw it.

Its form was never constant. Always shifting, always changing – death in this galaxy took many forms, some of them pleasant. Most of them not. She had seen many forms, but she knew not to fool herself into thinking she had seen them all. Death lurked in every corner of the stars, always shifting. Always changing.

For her father, it had taken the shape of water. An accident on Naboo’s oceans, a sudden drop in barometric pressure, seconds to act, none of them long enough to prevent anything. A story and death as unique as it was commonplace, far out on Naboo’s oceans. Water brought life, but took it away just as quickly. They way it always had, and the way it always will.

For Rabé and Eirtaé, death had come in the form of a line of stormtroopers. The wrong end of a blaster – too many blasters – aimed at the diminutive yet ferocious women Sabé had been honored to call her sisters. It had rained, then. Water again. Rain had fallen in sheets as the Imperial officer read the charges, spitting the words at Rabé and Eirtaé as if to shame them. They’d stared him down with their handmaiden’s masks pulled firmly in place. Passive. Unyielding. Observant. Knowing.

Their lack of emotions had irked the officer, and next to Sabé, Eirtaé’s older brother Ari had managed a tiny smirk through the thick tears in his eyes. A former handmaiden and former King of Naboo watched as the order was given, as the blasters were drawn. They’d betrayed no emotions, not a one, not the two standing in front of the rifles or the ones watching. She’d still taken his hand, though, and his grip had been near enough to bruise hers.

Death came in many forms.

Sabé watched as her sisters were executed. To the very end, they had not betrayed her, though she could clearly see the bruises and cuts that marked Imperial ‘interrogation.’ She hated those marks, and burrowed that hatred deep in her core. Though she knew they would have been aghast to hear it, Sabé sometimes woke up from nightmares where she had wielded the knives herself. When she had asked for their help, they knew what it might come to. Rabé and Eirtaé had not revealed Sabé, had not whispered her name, even as interrogator droids shot them full of serums and poisons and demanded to know the name of the Fulcrum agent they had worked so tirelessly to inform.

They had not faltered, and they had not given the Empire her name, and the Empire took their lives in revenge.

The braver, or perhaps the more foolish, of Theed’s population whispered that the skies were crying, that Naboo was crying. The people could not weep for the daughters of Naboo, branded as traitors. _Traitors from the Emperor’s homeworld itself!_  

Had Theed wept, Theed would have bled.

And so the skies had wept for them.

And for her once-love, for her summer lover, for her Padmé, death had come in the form of life. A tiny baby girl. Bail had brought Padmé’s body to them, and he had taken Sabé aside to show her the restless child, tucked in a makeshift crib onboard the ship. The child’s eyes were open and already she stared upwards with her mother’s level gaze. It had unnerved Sabé. She had looked away. And murmured that once Padmé was buried, once the mourning rites had been observed, she would follow Padmé’s daughter to Alderaan. “I can help teach her,” she had said. “Diplomacy, etiquette, languages. Hand-to-hand combat. Anything.” Her  _ please _ went unsaid but Bail had picked up on it right away.

Bail had agreed. And two years later, had approached Sabé with a whispered plan, and a title, and a chance to fight back.  _ Fulcrum _ , he’d said, pushing a datapad towards her. A rebellion as young as the young Princess herself. Sabé had smiled – not a true smile, not a full one, not anymore – because Padmé’s words were  _ everywhere _ . Her love for democracy, for the people she had served. Padmé was the mother of the rebellion. Her mark, her words, her work would live on. She’d noticed the warnings signs too late to save herself, or the Republic, but she’d laid the foundations for those who survived her. Bail and Breha, Mon Mothma. And now Sabé.

For nearly twenty years, Sabé had worked. She’d pushed herself, taxed her body and mind and soul to the limits to fight Palpatine, to fight the Empire. From the moment Bail had delivered Padmé’s body to Theed, Sabé’s anger had burned deep in her core, deep enough that it never broke through the surface. She’d nurtured it, a limitless source of energy that fed her work as a Fulcrum agent. Her anger was entirely directed at the Empire, at the one who had fooled them all.

And during it all, she had helped raise and teach Leia. She was grateful to the Organas that they allowed her to be close to Padmé and Anakin’s daughter. It was a gift.  _ She _ was a gift.

Sabé had never asked Padmé about young Anakin Skywalker, but she hadn’t needed to. Sabé had been Padmé’s decoy. She could eat, breathe, sleep, negotiate exactly like her Queen. She had long ago memorized the way Padmé had sat down and stood up, the way she walked, the way her lips pursed in thought. Even if she had tried, Padmé could not hide anything from Sabé.

Sabé had never asked about Skywalker because Padmé’s love for him burned as bright as a lakeside sun on her face, even across the shaky holo messages that made up the brunt of their communications. Sabé knew that Padmé loved Skywalker, suspected that Padmé had done something tangible to prove it. And sometimes, when Leia stomped her foot and furrowed her brows, her father’s temper shone through. She might have looked like Padmé, Bail and Breha might have nurtured her work in politics and humanitarian aid, but her attitude was entirely Skywalker’s. Sabé didn’t ask after his fate. Bail probably didn’t know, and even if he did, a Jedi’s fate was not too difficult to guess.

She assumed he had died in the terrible purge, at the end of yet more blasters.

At least Rabé and Eirtaé hadn’t known the ones who had fired upon them. That, at least, was a small kindness in a galaxy lately devoid of small kindnesses.

She’d dyed her hair a deep red after that. She couldn’t stand looking in the mirror and seeing the ghosts of all her dead friends and companions and sisters. Red for Naboo, red for anger, red for blood. Sabé was the last of them all, the last one standing, and yet she continued to work. Or perhaps it was  _ because  _ she was the last, that she continued to work. She would work until her heart stopped beating, for the love of her sisters.

Death came in many forms.

And now, it seems, death had finally come for Sabé Nyima.

Alderaan was beautiful.

It was cold, compared to Naboo, but Sabé had not been there in at least a decade, not since Rabé and Eirtaé were killed. Her work as a Fulcrum agent meant she traveled with a permanent mark upon her head, a shadow that could mark her as good as dead if she made the tiniest error. Traveling back home, to the Emperor’s homeworld, would have been foolish and risky and she knew she would not have been able to bear to see it covered in the ugliness of the Empire. Alderaan was the heart of the Rebellion now, and it was here that Sabé’s work could continue unimpeded. It was cold, but she had grown used to the mountain air, to the snow.

Rabé would have loved it. Sabé kept a healthy vine of candlewick flowers on her desk, in memory of the girl who had adored colorful flowers of any kind.

Sabé pushed back the thick hood of her cloak, brushed her deep red hair out of her eyes, and watched as death sat heavy in the sky. Waiting.

She’d been hard at work at her desk, tracing gossamer threads of loopholes in legal systems and potential nicks in the Empire’s supposed grandeur to exploit, new allies to seek out, when death had burst from hyperspace. She’d been following the reports from Scariff, from Tatooine. Sabé knew what this thing had done, what it was capable of.  _ Planetkiller _ . She’d been to Jedha once. And now they were short another Fulcrum – Cassian was gone. The Rebel fleet that had limped away from Scariff had confirmed everyone on planet to have perished.

As a Fulcrum agent, she always knew.

Her servitor droid had been cleaning up her breakfast from where she’d taken it on the balcony. The droid had come into her room, given her cup of caf, and remarked, “There is a new moon in the sky.”

Sabé’s eyes were bleary from the datawork in front of her. “What?”

“There is a new moon in the sky.”

Delivered in its usual monotone, emotionless voice, the phrase had made her skin crawl. Everything snapped into greater focus, into greater detail, as it did when she was frightened of something. She was trained to handle fear. She worked better under its yoke. She did not feel fear in the moment when it pressed down heaviest around her. Fear was for afterwards, for when the work was done.

Sabé stepped out onto her balcony, tilted her face to the sky, and gazed steadfastly at this new moon. Carved from suffering and fear, it hung in Alderaan’s brilliant blue sky. She knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that Leia was on board that monstrosity, and for a moment the fear burst through her cold numbness. Leia never shied away from a fight, and Sabé – for a brief, gut-wrenching moment – was terrified at what that might have cost her onboard that battle station. And then the fear was gone. Leia was smart, she was brave, she would survive.

Sabé wondered if this was how her father had felt, in the moments before the oceans had suddenly risen up to swallow him. There was no time, and she was not afraid. Around her, the palace came alive with panicked cries and confused shouts, people scrambling towards the windows and balconies or towards their loved ones. The people who went to their families knew what it meant. The people who went to the balconies were curious, confused. Sabé was alone on her private balcony, but she could see throngs of people pouring from the halls and rooms of the palace to stare up at the new moon hanging in the sky.

The Empire was negotiating now, up on that battle station. Alderaan had minutes now. Probably seconds. Whoever was in charge up there had probably made up their mind before they had set Alderaan as their destination. There was no time, not anymore, not for anything. Sabé calmly punched in a sequence on her wrist comms, and behind her, her dataportal whirred to life for the last time, transmitting her work across the stars, heavily encoded, deeply embedded to another Fulcrum. To the first Fulcrum. The first step she had taken when Bail had brought her into the fold – a failsafe code to protect their work – was also her last.

Sabé Nyima was not afraid to die. Not anymore.

So she spread her palms on the cool marble surface of the balcony railings, listening to her none-the-wiser droid finishing cleaning. Her fingers traced the leaves of the ivy, the breeze tossed her hair from her forehead. Images of everyone she had known danced by in her mind as the sun started to warm her face. Her sisters, her mother and father. Nieces and nephews. Lovers, from Padmé to the pirate captain Ninx. A young Obi-Wan Kenobi and his grizzled Master, young Anakin Skywalker. And then during the Clone Wars, brief visits to Kenobi, chats with his Commander and the men under his command. Missions against the Separatists, the Separatists that had, at the time, seemed the apex of all evil. Bail and Breha, hopefully holding one another as they waited on their own balcony. She liked to think they were holding each other.

All gone. All long dead, or as good as.

But those who still lived – Leia. Ahsoka. Kallus. Ninx, hopefully. The Rebellion. Countless worlds, countless systems, countless lives.

Hope.

Alderaan would perish, but hope would live on.

Sabé breathed in Alderaan’s fresh, crisp mountain air and grinned savagely up at Death, and bright, sickly green light began to cluster together in its distant power circuits. The sound reached them long terrible seconds before the blast struck. It felt like her muscles were being shaken apart from her bones.

Time was up. Negotiations were over. People started to weep, Alderaan started to shake, but not her.

Sabé laughed when death finally came for her, laughed and smiled and rejoiced as the bright lights blinded her, because she could already feel the hands of her long-lost loved ones embrace her once more, Rabé and Eirtaé and Padmé and her father, and she knew she was not alone.

Not anymore.

The mountains, once distant, folded up above her head. Snow fell on her head, pine needles mixed with the ash.

Water again.

Death came in many forms, and for Sabé Nyima, it was like finally going home.

She closed her eyes and smiled.

And met her death with open arms.

* * *

"Do not stand at my grave and weep   
**I am not there. I do not sleep.**    
I am a thousand winds that blow.   
I am the diamond glints on snow.   
I am the sunlight on ripened grain.   
I am the gentle autumn rain.   
When you awaken in the morning's hush   
I am the swift uplifting rush   
Of quiet birds in circled flight.   
**I am the soft stars that shine at night.**  
Do not stand at my grave and cry;   
I am not there. **I did not die.** "

\- Mary Elizabeth Frye


End file.
